TOPS 96 KITES 98 THE BUTLER GUARDS 103 PETS 108 INDIANS 124 GUNS 129 NUTTING 138 THE FIRE-ENGINES 145 IV. GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS 151 PASSING SHOWS 163 THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN 168 THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS 171 V. THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN 183 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE KITE-TIME _Frontispiece_ HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF WITH HER THE VERY NEXT MORNING 5 THE FIRST LOCK 43 THE BUTLER GUARDS 105 ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE 127 NUTTING 141 INTRODUCTION There are two conspicuous faults in the literary culture which we are trying to give to our boys and girls in our elementary and secondary schools: it is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not sufficiently national and American. Hence it lacks vitality and actuality. So little of it is carried over into life because so little of it is interpretative of the life that is. It is associated too exclusively in the child's mind with things dead and gone--with the Puritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere, the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparatively recent national interest, it takes the child back to the strange folk of the days of King Arthur and King Robert of Sicily, of Ivanhoe and the Ancient Mariner. Thus when the child leaves school his literary studies do not connect helpfully with those forms of literature with which--if he reads at all--he is most likely to be concerned: the short story, the sketch, and the popular essay of the magazines and newspapers; the new novel, or the plays which he may see at the theatre. He has not been interested in the writers of his own time, and has never been put in the way of the best contemporary fiction. Hence the ineffectualness and wastefulness of much of our school work: it does not lead forward into the life of to-day, nor help the young to judge intelligently of the popular books which later on will compete for their favor.